Advantage of using a white-label Event Management Platform

In order to create a fully custom Ticketing flow or seamlessly integrate a Registration/Ticketing solution into your website, there is no better way than using a Ticketing API, which is at the heart of the Event Management Platform.

Usually you get three levels of control with event management systems:

1. Out of box

A pre-built solution that consists of the Event website and Ticket purchasing flow. You can usually customize the Logo and change the color theme. Sometimes there is a simple content management system that allows for more advanced customization of event pages.

There are also simple widgets that may list available tickets or events that you can integrate into your existing website.

Here is an example of such an event:

New York Fashion Nights

2. White Label

Removes any mention of the Event service provider. You can use a custom domain. When finished, the solution can look like a fully standalone web application.

Grub Crawl helps foodies to get exclusive peeks behind the lines of some of the most celebrated kitchens in the industry. For their event directory, event pages and order flow they leverage a White Label solution. Their website appears as if it was made by GrubCrawl, but internally it is driven by the Event Management Platform.

Grub Crawl

3. Custom Website

A custom solution requires a bit of programming know-how, but gives you full control over the look and feel of the Event website and Order flow. You can code them in any programming language suited for the web: PHP, ASP.NET, Angular, take your pick. Internally your code will call API, provided by Event Management System, that will do all the heavy logic like handle availability and process payments.

Horse Country Tours sells tickets to horse-loving tourists and locals eager to get a behind-the-scenes look at many of the top farms in the area and see the sport’s most famous stallions. They have very specific requirements for their events/tours which can’t be easily met by any Event Management System. They chose to go with the Custom Website approach, to be able to fulfill their vision. Here is their site:

Horse Country

Using API to power Custom Event Website

API stands for application programming interface. Ticketing API provides a set of functionality to be able to create Event based applications. These applications can be Web Sites, Mobile Apps that run on IOS and Android, or even good ol’ windows Metro applications.

You can use Ticketing API to build all types of applications. Something as simple as a Mobile Social app that may get the latest ticket availability and notify potential customers or a VR box office that is driven by Ticketing API behind the scenes.

Ticketing Flow

In most cases you will want to leverage existing API to create a unique or branded event and ticket purchasing experience.

Such a flow usually consists of the following steps:

1. Get Event and Ticketing information
2. Check ticket availability and display the tickets accordingly
3. Create a cart to reserve the tickets for the duration of the order
4. Calculate totals to be able to display them to the customer, to know exactly how much he/she has to pay
5. Submit payment and View Confirmation page

Each one of these steps must have a related API call that takes requests and comes back with a response, for example a call to get tickets.

Must haves for a modern Ticketing API

Good Documentation

Any API is only as good as its documentation. Unfortunatley there are still many companies who only do it as afterthought.

Documentation should help Developers to get up to speed as quickly as possible. The first thing should be a list of common things. For example, with this Ticketing API you can:

• Sell Tickets
• Sell Seats
• Sell Products
• Sell Sessions
• …

For each one of these there should be a link that takes you to a description of select flow and API methods you need to use to be able to implement this flow. A full code example with actual working code is paramount. Otherwise developer will have to use trial and error, which is never fast.

Here is an example of Eventgrid API documentation:

https://apidoc.eventgrid.com

It has several short pages to get developers started. For presentation it uses a 3 column format popularized by Stripe API, so you can always see theTable of API Calls, description of the call and examples of the request/response for the call.

Short and convenient.

Security

Ticketing API endpoint must support SSL, which encrypts all the communication to/from API. Without SSL a clever hacker can monitor your traffic and get access to internal Event information.

It is usually sufficient to use basic authentication which requires an API Key and sometimes API Secret to access Event information and tickets. These values can be requested from customer service or available in the Admin Portal of Event Management System.

For user authentication the primary format is OAUTH, which is used by all of the who-is-who of the Internet world: Facebook, Google, MS.

REST & JSON

REST is a popular architectural style for building API and JSON is a popular format for requests/responses.

If the API implements these standards, that means that most developers will know how to easily access it.

Web Hooks

Web hooks allow your site to handle certain events triggered by the Platform. When a certain event such as “Order Paid” or “Event Created” occurs, Event Management System will call a provided url and pass some data to it. The WebHook url can be specified in the Account Settings.

Conclusion

Ticketing API gives you full freedom to leverage the Event Management Platform without being constrained by its generic user interface.

In many cases, the out of the box solution or White Label branding may be enough. If neither of these approaches meet your requirements, then a custom website that calls Ticketing API is the way to go.